Written by Jordan Michelman.
Ask around about who is doing the coolest work in mobile coffee right now, making waves at scale while innovating in the space, and you’ll hear the same answer across the American specialty coffee industry: Creature Coffee.
Based in Austin (and now with a wing in Seattle), founder Michael Craig’s growing empire of coffee carts knits together a kaleidoscopic range of experiences and offerings: they are a roaster, a full-fledged brand with curated menus in their own right, but they are also an ever-morphing gray label full-service coffee brand on demand, capable of creating customized and fully realized experiences for partners that include some of the largest companies in the world. No mobile company is more synonymous with the “mobile activation” offering than Creature, and they’ve done it all with a baseline dedication to quality and efficiency rooted in their partnership with La Marzocco.
To learn more I spoke with Michael Craig from Austin.
Hi Michael—thanks so much for speaking with me. For starters, as way of introduction, tell me more about your work with Creature.
Thanks, Jordan, of course. So first and foremost, we are a coffee roaster that specializes in sourcing specialty coffee, and a lot of people know us for that. But we started out with coffee carts, borrowing espresso machines, popping up at hotels and events and things, and I had no idea what I was doing. But now we specialize in espresso catering. We don’t do pop-ups at festivals and we never charge per cup; we get paid to go out and give free coffee.
We’re based in Austin and here we use La Marzocco GS/3 espresso machines exclusively. We now have 13 espresso carts, plus 3 iced beverage carts. We do every kind of event: corporate events, offices, events, nurses appreciation parties, house parties, morning raves, night raves, retail promotional work. We make coffee anywhere there’s no coffee.
Do you mean like, that most Austin of all Austin terms—the mighty “activation”??
Yes! So many activations. We started doing this about 7 years ago, before the pandemic, and things were relatively small until the pandemic kicked in. We’ve been gangbusters ever since. On a very busy week, like when there’s big conventions happening at the Austin Convention Center where we’re the preferred coffee vendor, we might do as many as 50 events in a week.
That’s wild. It sounds like your approach to the model has really evolved organically, but I’m curious how exactly you landed on this style of business, focused exclusively on mobile carts.
You know, I think a lot of people get into carts because it’s initially cheaper. We used to have a physical coffee shop actually, inside of a cool hostel on the east side of Austin, and it was really great while it lasted but the pandemic disrupted that. We had like two or three carts at that point and demand for the mobile service just kept getting busier and busier. Demand paced up, and we got to know people and started being recommended for different things, and before we knew it people started asking us for custom-branded experiences, and that unlocked a whole different part of our business, and allowed us to work with companies like Google and Amazon. Today maybe half the events we do are with people who want to hire us as Creature Coffee, because they like our band or had our beans before at an event, and that’s awesome, but the other half of the business is this custom experience side, and we had no clue two or three years ago how big that would be.
That’s amazing—so you’re creating fully on-demand custom coffee service experiences for brands?
Yeah! And we work with small brands, big brands, whoever wants to come to us. Sometimes it’s a really light touch, like they just want us to throw their logo on our cart. But Google, for example, said “Build us an entire coffee shop inside the Austin expo center.” Sometimes budgets get wild, too. New Balance built a huge expo set up for us. With these services, the menu will still kind of be set by us, and it’s pretty classic with some fun seasonal drinks, but brands will also have their own ideas about the drinks they want, and it’s our job to bring it to life.
What’s your gear set-up like on the carts?
Well, I’m from England, where we don’t have power issues, but in America, there is this 20 amp 110-volt situation, and so if we want to be able to set up a coffee cart anywhere and everywhere, we have to be able to use a standard plug. And so we go with a GS/3 for the carts in Austin, and in Seattle, where we’ve just expanded, we’re actually using Linea Minis so far.
In Austin, GS/3’s have the power we need along with a Mahlkonig grinder and a water pump. That has us right about 15 amps, and so long as we’re not doing an event in some old mansion that’s only got a 10 amp circuit, we’ll be good to go. We never really pop a circuit unless the DJ sneaks in behind us.
It’s been interesting working with the Linea Minis now. Personally I’m a GS/3 guy—there’s a lot more flex on the espresso setting up and dialing in, but there’s advantages both ways, honestly, and spec wise they’re not all that different. Some people prefer the Linea Mini vibe, which is so classic. But in Austin we just use GS/3s, because our work as Creature in Austin is really intertwined with that machine.
I know some of this you may not be able to go into details on, but are there any particularly wild or memorable events you’ve done the coffee for over the years?
Well, when SXSW comes to town each year we’re just gangbusters busy. In 2024 we had 12 activations per day, all within a half mile of each other, and all of them custom custom-branded. SXSW is known for the volume and craziness it brings to the town, and so you wind up having to problem solve for that—if one of your activations needs beans or milk, you can’t simply drive over there to support them, because the whole city is shut down for the festival, including the roads. It’s wild.
We’ve certainly done some memorable late-night parties, and parties at huge mansions late at night that felt pretty wild. For me, I immediately just think about some of the Expo events at the Austin Convention Center where our team is putting out 1.5k drinks in a single day—which is absolutely wild.
Once we had an event on the runway at the Austin International Airport, which was quite fun. We had to wait for planes to taxi past us and then roll our gear out to one of the hangars. We did a very memorable festival in Marfa as well, at the El Cosmico. We sent 4 baristas and a couple of vans to be gone for 5 days or so, and when they came back every single piece of gear was just caked in desert dust.
Visit Creature Coffee Co. at their website and on Instagram.
